Airline Biz Blog

US Airways apologizes for shocking photo it accidentally tweeted

Isn’t Twitter wonderful? First, it allowed someone, allegedly a 14-year-old Dutch girl, to make a threat Sunday against American Airlines. Now, American’s merger partner, US Airways, is apologizing for sending out a graphic photo Monday.

No, we won’t be reprinting the photo. It showed a woman who was wearing nothing and playing with a toy airplane.

It was displayed as a link on Twitter in reply to an unhappy customer, we understand. The link was supposed to take the customer to a customer service site. Instead, it took readers to a photo of the woman.

“We apologize for an inappropriate image recently shared as a link in one of our responses,” US Airways subsequently tweeted. “We’ve removed the tweet and are investigating.”

“Don’t apologize it was great!” one Twitter member tweeted. “Needed: eye bleach after viewing that US Airways picture,” another tweeted. “USAirways tweet it again,” a third requested.

A Mashable item listed what it thought were the top 31 tweets in response to the US Airways mistake/hack/whatever.

Here’s the explanation of what went wrong from parent American Airlines Group:

“We apologize for the inappropriate image we recently shared in a Twitter response. Our investigation has determined that the image was initially posted to our Twitter feed by another user. We captured the tweet to flag it as inappropriate. Unfortunately the image was inadvertently included in a response to a customer. We immediately realized the error and removed our tweet. We deeply regret the mistake and we are currently reviewing our processes to prevent such errors in the future.”

(As a side note: In case you were wondering, the photo was totally, totally inappropriate. It showed a toy Boeing 777, and US Airways doesn’t fly Boeing 777s.)

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Terry Maxon writes about items of interest to travelers and the aviation community.